Home Entertainment

The folks over at Fabrica have created a new interaction installation called Home Entertainment for the windows of “style, design, art, food” shop, colette, in Paris. It is a ceramic iMac set amongst other ceramic versions of bygone consumer technologies and follows in the line of several of the Fabrica window interactives, which capture footage passers-by when they press a button:

… the electronic display shows a moving image sequence of hundreds and hundreds of ghostly faces, peering intently out of the window and trapped in a never ending video loop. These are the faces of passers by in the street who, by touching a special sensor set into the store window, have triggered a video camera to record a short sequence – 24 frames or one second of moving image – of themselves to add to the exhibition. Each day the exhibition grows as more and more passers by add themselves to the artwork.

The ‘curator-speak’ paragraph at explains it to the art-crowd (though let’s face it, the important part of this is the fun):

It raises questions about the relationships between technology, innovation, nostalgia and the uncanny. At the same time it articulates an approach to interactive art which stresses a transactional or relational form of audience engagement whereby passers by in the street are invited to take an active part in the ongoing construction of the show. This approach derives equally from video game culture and the critical art theory of relational aesthetics.